Amarillo by Morning

If you’re wondering how (and why) I started writing these stories, I guess I can tell the story.

It started shortly after my daughter, my wife and I opened our yarn store. We had no experience running a store and probably shouldn’t have run a store anyway. That said, we learned a lot by watching the other stores in the area.

We were open for a while when my daughter (first batch) suggested the store needed a blog. I was working in construction at the time and truthfully I had no idea what a blog was. Somehow, for some reason, ol’ first batch decided that it would be my job to write a blog for the store. She mandated I read other yarn store blogs and write something similar. It sounded simple.

The blogs that I read spoke of yarn, yarn patterns, food recipes, and events in the stores. I was told to duplicate what I read. Only one problem, I didn’t know anyhting about yarn, patterns and recipies. Oh I guess I could have offered directions for oatmeal, raisin cookies or something like that, but I didn’t think I could give advice on yarn, etc. Ol’ first batch insisted I could write something, so Monner’s Mumblings was the stores blog.

As I said, yarn was not anything I knew anything about; I worked in construction. I also was the father of two bunches of kids and played with livestock on my ranch. I decided to write about that, possibly because no one was watching (or most likely reading) me.

So, I wrote (write) about what I knew (know). Having worked in twenty(+) different states made stories easy to come by. Well, not all of them, some of them I will need to leave to imagination. Like when I took a crew to Amarillo, Texas to turn a restaurant into a honkey tonk bar and grill.

The crew and I gutted the building and cover the walls with new cedar lumber. I worked for about a week before I developed what I thought was a cold. With everyday I worked in the building my cold got worse. The long story short, it wasn’t a cold. I was allergic to cedar sawdust. The sawdust eventually put me in a Texas hospital.

Remember now, I brought a crew (two young men) with me to Texas. I gave permission for the crew to take my company truck to get a couple drinks after work. I was suffering from I thought was the cold and decided to just stay in thhe motel where we were staying. There was a live band (Vince Vance and the Valiants) playing in town that the crew had an interest in.

At some point, in the wee hours the crew returned to the motel, giggling like school girls. In the morning, they returned the keys to my truck. There was a bullet hole in the back window and my brief case was missing.

The crew had found a couple women/girls for the purpose of God knows what. One of the women was wearing a fur coat that one of my guys thought his girlfriend back home would like the coat. I was told that’s when the bullet hole happened. We were able to finish the project and get back to Colorado. I never took Bruce with me again.

These are some of the stories I could blog. But not all of them.

God Bless, Love ya, allergies can be dangerous

Our crazy lives!

Monner